When I saw that I’d taken five pictures of my coffee coming out of the machine this morning for this challenge, I was reminded of the old Fry’s Five Boys Chocolate Bars.

I remember getting one of these bars from a chocolate machine at Glasgow Central Train Station for Threepence when I was a very young child. I’m sure I had eaten it long before the train pulled out of the station for our long journey to England . This journey now takes 2 hours but used to take most of the day, with the (steam)train seeming to stop at every station on the way.

As kids we used to pull faces like the boy on the wrapper….well there were no iPads, Pokemon or even many televisions around in those days…..so yes, we amused ourselves any way we knew how!

Fry’s Five Boys was a solid milk chocolate bar that was once the most recognised chocolate bar in the world. It was still being sold until its withdrawal in 1976. But who remembers it now?

It was first sold by J S Fry & Sons of Bristol in 1902 with a wrapper showing not five boys, but the face of one boy, in a sailor suit, with five different expressions representing his anticipation and experience of eating the chocolate bar. Beneath each face was a caption:

The five pictures were photographs taken in 1885 and were used by J S Fry & Sons in its advertising; appearing on enamelled metal signs displayed outside confectioners, on posters and in newspapers. The boy was Lindsay Poulton, aged five, and his father and grandfather took the photographs for which Fry’s paid £200, a very large sum at the time, to have exclusive use of them.

Lindsay Poulton was still around in 1960s when he was tracked down by the Bristol Evening Post to Rhode Island in the USA. Mr Poulton remembered the photographic session well, particularly the Desperation shot, when his grandfather induced the necessary look, and the tears, by placing a cloth soaked in photographer’s ammonia around his grandson’s neck! – PocketBook.co.uk

Ah, those were the days….so long as you weren’t a small boy with a modelling contract for a chocolate company.